Through Thick and Thin (29 page)

“If I want someone to talk to,” she begins, “about this?”

“You can always talk to Dr. Petty,” he says quickly. But she doesn’t want to do that, not because she hasn’t, throughout much of this, thought it might be nice to have her own therapist, not because she hasn’t on occasion wondered if it would be okay in the middle of a Weight Watchers meeting to say, “You know, instead of one toffee crunch ice cream bar for dessert, I actually had three. And I know that’s probably not the best use of points, but you see, my husband has an addiction to prescription painkillers and I haven’t told anyone, not even Meredith, and it’s a hard secret to keep and even if it wasn’t (but it is) it’s a hard thing to live day-to-day not knowing what’s going to happen next.” She wonders if she’d get a gold star. But she doesn’t want to talk to Dr. Petty because she has, this whole time, thought of Dr. Petty as Aubrey’s, and she’d like Aubrey to have that. She’d like him to have more things that are his.

“Well, if I don’t want to talk to Dr. Petty,” she continues, and he turns to look at her, “would you mind, and just say so if you do, that’s all I need to hear. Do you mind if I talk to Meredith? I won’t if you don’t want me to. I just . . .” and she doesn’t finish the rest of the sentence, she’s not exactly sure how to. So she just lets it linger there like blank spaces in the air, and she wonders if he can fill in the blanks.

He considers it for a moment, and then he says, “No, you should talk to Meredith, you should call her. I don’t really know what’s been going on with you two, and I’m sorry if it’s had anything to do with—with what’s been going on.” He turns away from her as he says it, and adds on again, “You should call her.”

“I don’t know if I will right now,” she says and they both stare out the window a while longer. Eventually, she takes her foot off the brake and lightly turns the car through the gates. As they pass through, she takes one last look at the plaque. It’s as if someone’s last name should be on it instead, and Aubrey’s not going to rehab at all. They’re going to a dinner party, or a weekend-long retreat at the Connecticut mansion of fabulously wealthy friends.

They turn up the long driveway, and the building at the end of it is more sprawling Connecticut farmhouse than it is Connecticut mansion, but still, it’s very peaceful. She wonders if that will make it easier, what he’ll have to go through here, what he’ll have to look at, what he’ll have to face. She’d like to think it won’t be as bad because it’s so peaceful, because it’s so pretty.

At the end of the driveway, Stephanie pulls into a spot marked
Visitors
and as she does she wishes that Aubrey was just a visitor, to so many things. She puts the car in park, and turns off the ignition and takes the key out. She holds the key in her hand and turns to look at him. She looks at his profile because he’s staring straight ahead, out the front window, not looking at her.

She knows on some level that she’s telling his story, that she’s been telling his story all along. And she knows there isn’t any way that Aubrey doesn’t look horrendous in it. But he’s not, he isn’t. She knows that in this story she’s been telling, that Aubrey is the villain. And he isn’t, deep down inside, without all the Vicodin, he’s really not a villain at all. It’s the Vicodin, she has to believe, that is the villain. Or maybe it’s 75 percent Vicodin and 25 percent Aubrey. Maybe that’s how it works out. And now that she’s thinking of it, she would have liked, in telling his story, to have put in more flashbacks, more images of Aubrey when he was everything that was good in her world, when he was all brightness, all light, before he was always in the basement. She thinks she should have done that, that it all would have come across better that way. But it just never seemed to fit in. The time never seemed to be right. And also, she’s been so busy.

“Well,” she says slowly, “just remember that Bonfin, if you spell it a bit differently, and add a
la
, the translation, in French, it means
the good ending.
”

A while goes by, long enough so that she doesn’t think he’s going to acknowledge that she even said anything, and she’s begun to feel like maybe it was a stupid thing to say at this moment. But is there a sort of thing you’re supposed to say at a moment like this? She’s not sure there’s any way to know. There’s no reference because the people who have had these moments, who could tell you how you’re supposed to act, don’t tend to talk about them.

“I wonder if that’s the same thing as a happy ending?” he says, still looking out the front window.

“Maybe it is,” she says.
Happy ending,
she thinks, just like something in a movie. Except how do you know the ending is in fact happy, if you don’t know what happens after the last line is spoken, after that last scene, as the camera pulls back and an uplifting song plays in the background and everyone’s laughing or smiling or kissing or some combination of the three? How can you be sure that everything doesn’t just go to hell right after that?

“Should I?” she asks, “Should I come in with you? And help with the paperwork and all, you know? I’m happy to. I mean, I want to.”

Aubrey unclips his seat belt and Stephanie watches it slide back up into its holder. She watches the way his shoulder shifts to free itself from the strap and the way he moves, every single one of his gestures, they’re so familiar.

“Nah,” he says.

She holds on to the steering wheel and stares out the front window and nods her head. “Okay.”

Aubrey keeps staring, straight out the front window, too. She wishes for a moment, for maybe longer, that she could reach over to him and put his seat belt back on and drive away from here, and more than that, make it so that none of this ever happened. She holds on to that thought, that none of this ever happened, wishes on it like some burnt-out star for what feels like forever. And she imagines that’s how long she’ll want it to be true.

He leans over then, across the middle console, and it’s so unexpected that it almost startles her. It’s awkward, and they bump into each other in the same way they would have if they’d never reached out to each other before, if they’d never held on. And then he pulls away, but he doesn’t go back to the windshield, he stays turned, looking at her.

“I love you, Stephanie,” he says.

“I love you, too, Aubrey,” she says, and she takes a deep breath, because she doesn’t want to leave him here with a sentence that ends in tears. She doesn’t think crying is the right thing to do right now, but then who knows. She steadies herself, and when she’s sure she has a handle on herself, or rather when she thinks she does, she says to him, “And you know I’ll be here.”

He stares out the side window now, and she knows he heard her even though he doesn’t answer. “I’ll be here,” she says again, and she’s not even sure she’s talking to him anymore, if it’s a promise she’s making to him anymore, or if it’s now one she’s making to herself, and also to Ivy.

Aubrey moves in his seat, and he says something then, and it sounds like, “God,” but she can’t be sure. She isn’t sure she can hear properly anymore. Just as she isn’t sure she can see. She isn’t sure anymore if the things she sees aren’t just things she imagines and things she makes up. But right now she thinks she can see Aubrey putting his hand to his face. She thinks she can see his thumb in the corner of one eye, his forefinger in the corner of the other, his palm over his mouth. She thinks she can see his shoulders moving up and down rhythmically. She thinks she can hear him breathing in through his nose, liquidy and thick. He reaches over again, with his free hand, the one not covering most of his face. He reaches behind her neck, and leaves his hand there, and gently squeezes. She hears something else and it doesn’t sound like “God” anymore. It’s high-pitched and full of air, and it shakes and goes in like a whistle and then out, out, and out.

And then he says, “Alright,” and she hears the door handle clicking. She hears the door open, and then she hears the door close.

She pulls the sleeve of her sweatshirt over her hand and wipes her face with it and turns to look out the side window after him. She watches him walking away, watches the way he hikes his bag over one shoulder, the way it hangs off his side. She watches the back of the man who has been by her side for all her greatest moments, the man who has been with her on all the absolute happiest days of her life. And now, for this one, too.

“Yes,” Meredith says, “I’m just walking across Union Square right now. We’re meeting at Blue Water Grill.”

“Well, great. I think you’ll have a great time. Call me after,” says Leslie.

“I will,” she says, and disconnects. As she makes her way over to the restaurant she thinks that although a Sunday brunch date hardly ever says romance to her, it’s a good thing that she’s going. She’s looking forward in fact to going on a date, since she hasn’t been on one in quite a while. She doesn’t think the one with Gary can count, because it wasn’t really a date. And she doesn’t think she should think right now about Gary. She’s looking forward to Blue Water Grill; she often does. She tries not to think that the only reason Leslie and Kevin have set her up on this date is because in their happy couple bliss, maybe at one point, when they were at the movies, Kevin leaned over to Leslie and said, “You know, I always suspected Meredith liked me, and maybe we should find her someone, just someone to go on a date with, because it’s been such a while.”

Her phone rings again, and even though she’s much more Zen now, is doing her best to embrace a more yoga-inspired lifestyle even when she isn’t practicing on her mat, she thinks,
Leslie, what now,
as she flips her phone open quickly.

“Hello,” she says.

“Meres, hi.”

She forgets all at once that she’s been angry and she forgets all at once about everything, and it’s so good just to hear her sister’s voice, and she thinks she has so many things to tell her, and that maybe one of those things should be “Sorry.”

“Oh, gosh. Oh, Steph. Hi.”

“Hi, Meres. Listen, I know you must be so mad at me. I know you must think I’m just awful.”

“No, no, Steph, I don’t. I don’t,” she says softly, and she doesn’t. She can’t say she has ever, throughout a lot of this, actually understood, but she doesn’t think Stephanie is awful. Mostly, she wonders if Stephanie would understand if she told her that in its way, it had been a good thing, how she left her alone, how even though she missed her and thought about her so often, that she wouldn’t have done some of the things, so many of the things, she’s done lately if her world hadn’t been shaken up, if her perspective hadn’t been changed. “And I have so many things to tell you, good things.”

“Meres, I don’t mean to cut you off, and there’s so many things I want to say, too, but,” Stephanie says, and she sounds different, a little cautious and maybe a little sad, “I’m calling because I really have to tell you something.” Meredith stops walking, holds on to her phone tighter than she had been.

“Sure, Steph, anything. What do you have to tell me?”

She can hear Stephanie taking a deep breath. “I have to tell you the truth.”

Wow,
Meredith keeps thinking over and over again as she stands across the street from Blue Water Grill, staring blankly at it, focusing and not focusing on the large blue banner that hangs over the entrance from a second story window. It’s a different type of
wow
she is thinking and saying over and over again in her head. It’s not festive, there is no exclamation point. It’s more of a horrible
wow.
She’d never thought before that
wow
s could be horrible, but it’s amazing, it’s almost mind-boggling really, how very many things she might not know.

“I can catch the next train,” she’d said to Stephanie. And Stephanie had been so calm, so peaceful that Meredith had wondered if it was possible that all that was good about Stephanie hadn’t been affected by everything Stephanie had just told her.

“Meres, I love you for offering. And I do want to see you, so much. But I literally just got back from dropping him off, and I think I need, oh, a moment, or the afternoon. What about a little later on in the week, would that be okay?” Stephanie had asked.

Meredith wanted to argue, wanted to insist, but she heard something in her sister’s voice and she felt assured that Stephanie’s spirit wasn’t broken, but maybe just a little bit bent, and she hadn’t really wanted to, but she’d said okay. And they made plans for Wednesday. She didn’t have her blind date’s number on her, to call him up and cancel, and she didn’t know what else to do.

She takes a deep breath, looks straight ahead at Blue Water Grill, no longer looking forward to it, and crosses the street.